New Way Now: Kraft Heinz turns creation bottlenecks into content breakthroughs with Google AI
21Featured in this video: Justin Thomas, Head of Digital Experience and Growth at Kraft Heinz
Executive summary: To become the world’s most creative and consumer-focused food company, Kraft Heinz is amplifying human creativity with TasteMaker, its “promptless” AI marketing and innovation platform. Powered by Vertex AI, the platform has helped reduce the long lead times and high costs of manual production processes, enabling teams to quickly generate and refine creative assets like copy, images, motion, and video, all without writing a single prompt. Tastemaker integrates advanced generative AI models like Google’s Gemini, Veo, and Imagen, and draws on a rich library of brand intelligence — past campaigns, brand tone and visual identity, and in-depth consumer insights — to ensure content accurately reflects the Kraft Heinz brand. Now, marketing and product development teams can deliver fresh creative concepts and assets at scale — and on demand — cutting the creation timeline from eight weeks to eight hours and achieving a 4x increase in speed to value.
Challenge: Kraft Heinz’s manual content creation processes required extensive coordination and resources, leading to long lead times and high costs that hindered its ability to respond to emerging trends and adapt to specific markets. With more than 200 beloved brands in its portfolio, the legendary food group wanted to embrace gen AI to scale its content workflows and speed up the time it takes to cook up new creative concepts.
Solution: Using Google Cloud, Kraft Heinz built TasteMaker — its “promptless” AI marketing and innovation platform that generates fresh, on-brand content. Powered by Vertex AI, TasteMaker integrates Google’s Gemini, Veo, and Imagen models, enabling teams to generate and refine creative concepts and assets like copy, image, motion, and video — all without writing a single prompt. The platform can produce content on demand that accurately reflects the Kraft Heinz brand, drawing on a rich library of brand intelligence, including past campaigns, brand tone and visual identity, and in-depth consumer insights.
Results: TasteMaker has transformed the way Kraft Heinz brings brands to life, providing an AI-powered engine that fuels creativity and innovation while reducing costs. Now, teams can deliver brand-aligned creative concepts and assets at scale and on demand — cutting the creation timeline from eight weeks to eight hours and delivering 4x faster time to value.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Justin Thomas, Head of Digital Experience and Growth at Kraft Heinz:
→ “We want to be the most creative, consumer-focused food company in the world. For us, that means how do I resonate with you through my marketing? Previously, it was a very manual process. A food shoot, where you're trying to style a specific product, a specific brand — it requires a lot of coordination. It’s time and cost. With TasteMaker, we are enabling people to create as they like without having to worry how long [this is] going to take, what's the process.”
→ “TasteMaker is our AI platform for all of marketing and innovation at Kraft Heinz. We're able to produce concepts, creative in the form of image, motion, and video. It's all powered by a mix of Gemini, Veo, and Imagen. We are able to build a library that we can draw from — past campaigns, our brand tone, our visual identity, as well as our understanding of the consumer.”
→ “We have people across our marketing community, in our innovation teams, in R&D, all using the TasteMaker platform, and we’ve been able to measure the impact that TasteMaker is having. We have a specific creative process with respect to producing content, producing copy imagery, video, and it has historically taken us eight weeks, and we've turned that into eight hours.”
→ “It's not just about giving people AI and hoping for the best. The other key point for us is being able to provide prompt-less apps for our employees has enabled faster speed to value. And so what used to take eight days, we can do it in two.”
→ “When we think about what's next for TasteMaker, we already know of a variety of new use cases. We continue to get feedback from our employees around new features and functionality that they want, and we're continuing to scale this capability globally. With Google Cloud, Kraft Heinz has a new way to accelerate and augment the power of our creativity.”
Google Cloud products used: Vertex AI, Gemini, Veo, Imagen
Learn more:
→ How Kraft Heinz Is Using GenAI To Reimagine The Future Of Creative Content: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/how-kraft-heinz-is-using-genai-to-re-imagine-the-future-of-creative-content/
→ Expanding Vertex AI with the next wave of generative AI media models: https://goo.gle/4kMtDkD
→ Vertex AI is now the only platform with generative media models across video, image, speech, and music: https://goo.gle/4o0WeWq